I’ve got an object lesson for you today, so let’s start with a story:

I recently bought a new camera (a Nikon D40 DSLR, which I love, thank you), but I’m irritated with Adorama camera. Even though we’re in different states, they charged me sales tax. I sent an e-mail to amazon.com who agreed that it should not have been charged, but that I’d need to contact Adorama directly, which I did. Now, I’m all kinds of happy with my actual order and I can’t fault their order fulfillment, but . . . my God, who do they have doing their customer service??

This is the reply I got back (with misspellings, bad typing, and multi-colors intact):

I am really sorry, but every one have to pay sales taxes, the difference on how much, it will depend on where the shipping address is.

For example I have an overseas credit card, when I use it here in NY either if I choose pick it up at the store or that they deliver it to me , I always pay 8.13%.

Also you please check Sales taxes in the United States - New Jersey has a 7% state sales tax. This is split as 3.5% for the State, and 3.5% for the municipality.

Um, ack! Completely disregarding the lack of a helpful response (i.e., the answer I want (grin)), this is one of the most badly-written, appallingly atrocious e-mails I have ever received. Really. Ever.

Think about how badly this makes Adorama look. I’m not happy about the $45 sales tax, but I am absolutely appalled at the verbal skills of this person from “On line customer services,” who doesn’t even seem to know that “online” is one word, or that titles and department names are usually capitalized. (The fact that she so nicely/patronizingly gave me a link to Wikipedia informing me that NJ has its own sales tax didn’t help matters. Gosh, really? I’ve never bought anything here ever in my life and hadn’t realized. SO helpful.) My verdict on Adorama? Great camera and very prompt service which I appreciated and can’t fault, but their follow-through and customer service?? Oy. Awful.

Which just goes to show–it doesn’t matter how good a service you provide, how well you fulfill that service IF you don’t back it up with a professional appearance. Good grammar may not be the most important thing in the world, but just like a clean appearance, a friendly smile, and decent manners … its absence sticks out like a sore thumb, and that’s what people are going to remember. Years from now, I might remember how quickly I got my camera in the mail, but I will absolutely remember the terrible e-mail I got from customer service. Not only that, but if I needed to place another camera order right now? I’d be more inclined to patronize a company whose employees show a reasonable grasp of the language.

You might say, but didn’t this employee got her point across? Yes, she did, but she left a bad impression. If there had been one typo in there, I would have chalked it up to a simple error. Everyone makes mistakes, and people are busy, yes, yes, but with this many? Not to mention the sloppy visual of the bad typing with double spaces between words, and the multiple colors? Not very professional.

And that is exactly the point. End of lesson.

As a purely side note, because I’m a good daughter, I’m attaching a link here to my father’s website, InhaleNow.com. He started it because he’d been looking for air purifiers to help with my asthma (because he’s a good dad). Providing a link was the least I could do, since, you know, I love him and all. Go take a look!

We will now resume our regularly-scheduled programming.

Seen in the wild:

This sign so incensed my sister, she went back and took a picture just for us. See it? It asks, “Have alot of square footage?”

This is a simple one, folks. “Alot” is not a word, unless you are referring to that little town in India.

When talking or writing about a “considerable quantity or extent,” it is correctly written as “a lot,” two words.

If you need further memory aids, as this site humorously points out, “You shouldn’t write ‘alittle’ either.” (At least, I hope he meant it humorously. I can’t say I’ve ever seen “alittle” in writing, but maybe I’ve missed something?)

I was visited by the Language Log yesterday, and it was not a friendly visit. Back in 2007, I wrote about the venerable Strunk and White grammar book, and in that post mentioned in passing that the authors were against split infinitives. Geoffrey Pullum, in his post yesterday, was apparently saddened by this since that was not, in fact, one of the rules Strunk and White insisted upon. Then he implied that I was professing admiration for a book that I hadn’t actually read–or had not read carefully.

With all due respect to Mr. Pullum, I have read the book, many times. However, the last time I read it through, cover to cover, was on August 5, 1996. (Yes, I keep a reading list.) I have about 100 grammar, usage, style, and writing books, and can’t always remember where I’ve read a certain rule–especially when it’s one like split-infinitives that crops up over and over again. (One example of such, from Karen Elizabeth Gordon, is pictured to the left.)

Now, I’ve never claimed to be an expert on grammar. I write about it, yes, and I try to be as precise as I can be because I love the subject and don’t want to pass along misinformation. You don’t need a Doctorate of Writing to be able to write, though, nor do you need to be an Ansel Adams to recognize a great photograph–or to take great snapshots. I realize that blogging about grammar therefore opens me up to criticism by the experts when I make a mistake.

What irks me, though, is that he took one, small, relatively unimportant element from a review and used it as a focus for an entire post about people (in this case, me) not knowing about split infinitives. If the post had been about split infinitives (which I’ve also written), this would have been entirely fair, but it wasn’t. This was like reading an article praising the Beatles, detailing all the reasons their music was so ground-breaking and definitive, but then tearing it apart because the author mistakenly said that “Hey Jude” was on the “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” album. A mistake that should not have happened, but one which hardly negates the rest of the article. I might have mistakenly used an incorrect example in my list, but that doesn’t mean that I was wrong about everything–just that I attributed a statement to one book that was made in (many) other books. To continue that example, it’s like that imaginary writer being lambasted for not understanding that “Hey Jude” was inspired by Paul McCartney’s efforts to cheer up Julian Lennon … when that had nothing to do with the original article about the Beatles as a band.

So, the lesson learned from this? Well, I could stop blogging about writing altogether, but that seems extreme. I could have left a protesting comment over on the Language Log, but the comments on that post were closed. Not to mention the lesson of the importance of taking things in context. Really, though, the best decision is just to shrug it off, right? Because that’s what civilized people do. And, at least Mr. Pullum acknowledges that I am, “…truly concerned about usage and punctuation and so on.” I suppose that’s something.

Am I being too thin-skinned here? Or am I being too nicely magnanimous? Opinions?